A growing chorus of North American commodity groups is calling on Europe to soften its zero tolerance stance on the presence of unapproved GM crops in grain shipments.
GM contamination cases are occurring more regularly as European labs develop more precise tools for detecting unwanted GM crop material.
The latest incident has disrupted Canadian flax sales to Europe as food products have been found to contain CDC Triffid, a GM flax variety that was deregistered eight years ago.
“To me, the most logical and potentially quickest way to resolve this problem would be a tolerance for low level presence,” said Barry Hall, president of the Flax Council of Canada.
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He is working with officials at Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada and the Canadian embassy in Brussels to convince European regulators to adopt a more reasonable tolerance level for GM contamination.
“Otherwise it’s just going to snarl trade,” said Hall.
The zero tolerance issue is affecting many commodities. About two months ago, two unapproved GM corn events were identified in several U.S. soybean shipments to the European Union.
They appeared in soybean meal that was processed in Germany. As a result, 180,000 tonnes of soybean meal were sequestered and EU importers have refused to book any additional shipments of U.S. soybeans. The situation is ongoing.
The American Soybean Association is calling on the EU to adopt a minimum five percent tolerance level for GM crops that have received regulatory approval in the country of export.
European feed and livestock industries are supporting U.S. soybean growers in their cause.
Alan McHughen, the breeder who created CDC Triffid, said testing for GM product has become so incredibly sophisticated that labs can find one GM seed among one million conventional seeds and that is an unworkable system in the real world of trade.
“Hopefully (the flax case) will be one more example to convince the Europeans to say, ‘OK, we have to abandon this zero tolerance and set a reasonable tolerance for putting up with GM material in these shipments,’ ” he said.
Even if CDC Triffid was found to be hazardous to human health despite being cleared by North American regulators, the amount of flax consumed is so
minuscule, it is hard to fathom anybody getting ill, said McHughen.
But the hysteria surrounding GM crops in Europe has reached the point where GM carnations developed in Australia received opposition in France because some people use the petals in their salads.
“They really reach for any kind of argument to keep foreign products out of their market,” he said.
But McHughen said European regulators turned a blind eye to the importation of GM soybeans from Brazil a few years ago. They refused to test the imported soybeans because they had assurances that GM soybeans were illegal in Brazil. Planting of GM soybeans in that country was rampant.
“They knew full well that had they tested those shipments, they would come up positive every time but then it would cause a big political stink and they once again would have to pay more to source non-GM soybeans from somewhere else and the food prices would go up,” he said.
That’s exactly what is happening today. Food costs in Europe are escalating because Europe’s livestock industry is having difficulty sourcing non-GM feed, said McHughen.
He feels the Europeans have painted themselves into a corner by adopting a zero tolerance policy.
“Canadian flax farmers are paying the price of that intransigence in Europe.”
